The Lost Books of the Bestiary - by Chapman Hood Frazier (Paperback)

About the Book

These poems explore the psychic connections between our human and animal selves in an imaginative, evolutionary journey that draws on sense, myth, and spirit to understand our genesis of becoming.

Book Synopsis

Chapman Hood Frazier was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia and has lived most of his life in Virginia. He completed a BA and MA at West Virginia University and wrote a creative thesis, How to Make Magic: Writing Poetry from Dreams. He completed a MS in Reading from Longwood College and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. During his tenure there, he was an associate director of the Young Writer's Workshop and a board member of the Crossroad's Waldorf School. He has taught at Southside Virginia Community College, Murray High School, The University of Maine at Presque Isle, and as a professor of English Education at Longwood University and James Madison University, and he is the recipient of the nationally recognized, "Good Neighbor Award" for outstanding teaching.

The Lost Book of the Bestiary, a finalist for V Press LC's Poetry Book Prize, is his first collection of poems. His poetry has appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The South Carolina Review, and other publications. His work has won numerous awards including the Edgar Allen Poe Award, The Sarah Lockwood Sonnet Prize, The Ekphrastic Poetry Award and others from the Poetry Society of Virginia, the Bayley Museum's "Writer's Eye" competition, and he has has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. In addition, he was a finalist for the 2018 Alexandria Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Contest,

Frazier was poetry editor for Longwood University's Dos Passo's Review for three years and a guest editor for The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. He has also published interviews with contemporary American and Northern Irish poets in Agni Online, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle and in The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser. His work with Kooser was also included in the 2015 Poetry Criticism edited by Lawrence Trudeau.

Currently, he lives with his wife, Deborah Carrington and near his two children, and Dylan and Caitlin, in Rice, Virginia

Review Quotes

"The Lost Books of the Bestiary is both requiem and elegy. The arrangement of the poems is evolutionary in nature, an exploration of a natural world that continues to teach us one of life's greatest paradoxes: that only in loss do we truly understand the essence of that which is now gone. Frazier's collection instructs us how to celebrate life even as it is passing from us, to realize that "the stone by the tomb's door...[is] a luminescence."

-Cathy Smith Bowers, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

"All love is but the body's chance of climbing ashore, to the sound of distance. Cloisonné, lapidary, this densely crafted first book mingles sacred and profane over ten years, addressing creatures or allowing them a human consciousness in what is not an invitation but an imperative we must in the end like Lazarus, obey." -Medbh McGuckian, Poet, and Writer-in-Residence, Queens College, Northern Ireland

"Whether Hood Frazier is speaking to creatures or letting the creatures speak through him, his poems have an unerring and intense sense of rhythm that is as concentrated as the life forms and cultural myths and mores it celebrates. These pell-mell, bold imaginings mingle intimate glory and unthinking horror into a fascinating and fascinated frenzy at the dazzle of things. What a dense, sensuous, energetic tour de force!"

-Gregory Orr, award-winning poet, Fulbright Scholar and professor at University of Virginia

"With the release of Hood Frazier's Lost Books of the Bestiary, we are given a collection that is both smart and intensely evocative. The language is rich and bears the freight of the poet's experience with lush dexterity. I turn to poetry for clarifying help as I try to negotiate my own memories and the weight of our present times. These poems, in many ways, constitute a lifeboat sent into rough water to save those who might be drowning."

-Tim Seibles, Author, Poet Laureate of Virginia, and Former Old Dominion University Professor